Epicurean Adventures from Eugene, Oregon

holiday

Instead of cookies, I made Christmas cheez-its, powered by Crossroads Farm’s pasilla, esplette, and Hungarian cherry pepper powders. They were a hit. I may never bake cookies again. Especially good served with smoked whitefish dip. So my present to you is the recipe. Merry Christmas!

Smoked paprika or esplette or pasilla powder and sesame seeds for topping

Cut butter into pieces and let sit on counter to soften. Grate cheese. Add an ice cube to a bowl of water to chill.

Combine flour, baking powder, and salt in a food processor bowl; pulse to combine. Add the butter and cheese and pulse until mixture looks like coarse cornmeal. Add 2 tablespoons water and pulse until the dough falls away from the sides of the bowl and can be formed into a crumbly ball, adding a little more water if necessary.

Divide the dough in two, forming it into a disk if you plan to roll it out, or a log if you’re lazy like me and just want to slice it. Chill for 1 hour to overnight.

Preheat the oven to 325° F. Either roll the dough out or slice your log into pieces 1/8-inch thick (no more!). You may need to let it warm up first on the counter a bit if you chilled overnight for easier rolling. You are aiming for thin, crisp crackers, so take care to make thickness even and consistent.

For Cheez-It-like bits, cut into 3/4-inch-wide squares and poke a hole in the center of each square with a skewer.

Place crackers on parchment-lined baking sheets and brush with egg white, then dust with paprika or the like and sprinkle with sesame seeds, if using. Bake until the dough is not shiny/raw and barely golden on the bottom, about 20-22 minutes. Store completely cooled crackers in an airtight container.

*Note: I forgot to brush with egg white, so the toppings slid off for the photo. Follow me at your peril!

Like this:

Just a few tidbits you might want to consider for last-minute, local, food-and-bev- oriented gifts. Or, you know, start your shopping NOW. I’m saying this kind of gloatingly from my high horse of Canning Nirvana Christmas Presents. Actually, I’m sitting on a mountain of frozen food and gloating. Ouch. It’s chilly up here. For those reasons, I’m always late on the food blogger giving buyable Christmas present lists. Sorry. That doesn’t mean these things aren’t worthwhile.

1) A blown glass golden pierogi ornament, as pictured above on my mantel. Forget those German pickle ornaments as so last year. There are also golden ravioli, if you are so unfortunate as to not be Polish.

2) A couple of bottles of O Wines chardonnay, which is an initiative to raise scholarship funds for young women, owned and managed by St. Michelle Wine Estates. Read more here about the story and wine. I received a sample of the red table wine and the chard, and both are pleasant and food-friendly and budget-happy, perfect for a gift for any family holiday party. Also, the logo looks like our ‘O’ for University of Oregon, so sportsfans would dig it. Their website notes that many of our local groceries (Albertsons and Safeways, Fred Meyers, and the Market of Choice on Green Acres) all carry the chard; not sure about the Red Blend.

3) Silicone goodness at Hartwick’s, if you can’t afford that sous vide machine or the Vitamix you’ve your loved one has been craving. These perfectly square ice cubes are oddly satisfying; the trays are often used by high-end bars. I’m not sure who else uses the silicone spatulas but me, but I wholly endorse them as one of my favorite kitchen items. You can use the business end or the handle for stirring and scraping various-sized projects, and high heat is ok.

4) A gorgeous wood pasta board or cutting board, custom-made by Bill Anderson in Eugene. Chef Rosa Mariotti‘s partner, Bill Anderson, is a retired engineer and woodworker, and he’s been making these lovely pasta/pastry boards and smaller cutting boards from various hardwoods, some exotic like the striped tigerwood. I have an entire album of samples here. They’ve kindly offered to sell the boards as a fundraiser for the Master Food Preservers of Lane County, OR. The pasta boards go for $90 and up (with the tigerwood being on the higher end), and Rosa can fill you in on the price of the smaller boards. I bought one of each, and they’re spectacular. For inquiries, send a message to Rosa on Facebook!5) Tomato-scented candles at Marché Provisions, because it’s almost summer again, right? I like the scent of the tomato leaf one better than the prettier tomato one, but it’s up to you to choose looks over talent. Or just buy any beeswax candle ever. They’re so sweet and slightly honey-sticky and that butterscotch color. Yum.

6) Also at Provisions, some truffles with local spirits (Bendistillery, Clear Creek, House Spirits, among others); a “Sniffle Slayer” lolly with lemon, ginger, honey and cayenne; and Hott Smoke sauce, which would kick those truffles’ and lollies’ asses. 7) Any number of fascinating little kibbles and bits at Sequential Biofuel, our loving local gas station with all kinds of healthy, sustainable, and gluten-free-friendly stuff, like a bison “candy” bar.

9) But the reason I’m really here is because I want to talk cookbooks. If your loved one cooks, these are the ones that grabbed me this year:

Molly Stevens’ All About Braising, an essential addition to your collection, even though you think you know all about braising. I just got it and I love it. Pair with her book on Roasting.

Tartine No. 3, the famed bakery’s new all grain baking book. Probably not for the beginner, but you could try. The recipes are thrilling for anyone who is struggling to perfect the no-knead technique.

JeffreyMorgenthaler‘s The Bar Book, also via Chronicle Books. It’s pretty fab, unsurprisingly, as one of the only cocktail books out there to offer a solid, technique-based guide for the home bartender. Expect to understand principles and classics, not fancy trends.

Not a cookbook, quite, but Heather Arndt Anderson’s new book about the food history of our fair City of Roses to the north, Portland: A Food Biography, promises to be filled with fun facts and even some recipes. Her Tumblr page is fascinating and reflects her research acumen, but be sure to click through to buy the book directly from her or the publisher.

And two hyper-local farm-to-table cookbooks: Anthony Boutard’s Beautiful Corn, the best treatment I’ve seen on the science and culinary merit of corn from a mellifluous farmer/writer in the tradition of Wendell Berry, and a great collection of local recipes for Beans, Grains, Nuts and Seeds: Further Adventures in Eating Close to Home by my fellow Eugene locavore, Elin England.

10) Aaaaand, for the ridiculous person on your list, one of the silliest things I’ve seen this year: costumes for your wine bottles. Available alongside many more reasonable gifts at Cost Plus. Or consider the leather cooler I saw on a clickbait site for gifts for the adventurous eater, or that damned “aroma fork” thing that makes your fork smell. WHY. Why not?

Like this:

It’s that time again! If you forgot the turkey, or these magnificent fellows from Boondockers Farm managed to intimidate you, you might be interested in Eugene restaurants open on Thanksgiving, a range for every taste:

For I sing (softly and despairingly and despondently at times, but I sing) the body electric, for those of us who look like paczki and act like paczki, for we endeavor to lick the creamy filling out of our mortal days on earth. I sing against watering down bourbon and decreasing diversity and kneecapping the tasty and pleasurable and loving. I sing against the heart made of stone and the heart heavy as a stone and the body denied and the breath captured and the unseeing eye and the muted word, even though I know that Lent will still come and what will rise in the place of pleasure is not nearly enough.

But today, wearing my new perfume — no, not THAT perfume, Jesus — I will sally my pączek form forth into the daylight, and greedily, desperately, try not to feel the legacy of enforced continence, the pinch of the present, the undeniable, frightening, slouching-toward-us-inchoately horrors of the future.

Nothing better we can do, really.

Culinaria Eugenius Paczki Day coverage throughout the years can be found here.

Like this:

The year ended for us with some food play — a joint special dinner with the new Asian fusion restaurant Mame and our local favorites, the PartyCart duo. The green interior, unfortunately, makes the light less than appetizing in photos, but I could save a few, and I think the others adjusted pretty well in black and white.

My favorite dishes were cured yellowtail nigiri sushi; a version of chicken Kiev by way of Buffalo and Paris, with blue cheese mousse and celeriac; Thai deep-fried “son in law egg” with quince caramel and fried shallots; and the lovely, tender raw scallop with “shaved scallop bacon” and a jalapeno vinaigrette. Retrogrouch models the scotch quail egg with chorizo and a miso honey mustard sauce, above. The courses were paired with a range of intriguing beverages, each wholly different from the next: a pink bubbly, peach mead, beers dark and white, and one flavored with saffron.

Like this:

Hope you had a happy Christmas, either celebrating or not celebrating. We had our usual feast of crab. Just crab. Nothing else. Simple, no? We usually get enough for leftovers — sometimes I make traditional crab soup. This year, I’m making California rolls from the crab, tobiko fish eggs, and avocado. It’s appropriate, since we had to buy California crabs this year due to the Oregon crab season’s delay. Not opening ’til December 30. Argh!

Retrogrouch is from Baltimore, where they eat crabs whole and hot, so we’ve learned instruct Oregon fishmongers not to clean our crabs or (egads) put them on ice, and then I quickly re-steam them with Old Bay and beer. Boris the cat helps by eating the mustard, the yellowy innards that are harder to eat on a Dungeness crab than on a Maryland Blue crab. Yes, he sits at the table. No, he isn’t allowed to do this at any other time.

We finished off the evening, or I should say *I* finished off the evening, with the rest of my special Tyrkisk peber (a salty, spicy black licorice candy from Finland) cocoa gingerbread cookies. They are the ugly ones above. And a serving of eggnog bread pudding as a nightcap.

I suppose I should really cook the crabs properly by purchasing them live, but they’d have to hang out for a day and I’m not sure I need that hassle. Christmas is a day of indulgence for me: no errands, no real cooking, no email, nothing but being present in the moment. Very hard to do. I flirt with the idea, occasionally, of following the Jewish Shabbat traditions where one just checks out for a day of rest each week from sundown to sundown, Friday to Saturday, to enjoy the company of one’s family and friends. Unfortunately, this is difficult to manage when one’s family and friends are connected mainly by internet. :) Not to mention, of course, you wouldn’t see an observant Jew eating crab to celebrate Christmas. But dunno. Maybe this idea is worth pursuing in the new year. I need a little more peace. Don’t we all?

Food Preservation News

Get 'em while you can: Interested in free publications on preserving just about anything that grows in Oregon? Extension offices in the PNW have worked together to create a research-based library of resources, now available in .pdf form.